TV critic chooses her top 5 fall TV shows

TV critic chooses her top 5 fall TV shows

It would have been so cool to splash that name over the cover of our fall TV preview.

But as much as I love saying “The Mob Doctor” ---- try it, it’s like “Snakes on a Plane” ---- I decided, as they say in Hollywood, to go in a different direction, with a big, splashy show set in the home of country music and starring a woman only recently freed from a house of horrors, and with four other shows that, based on one episode apiece, I’m crawling way out on a limb to call my Top 5 for fall:

ABC’s “Nashville”

In the best new show of the fall, Connie Britton (“Friday Night Lights,” “American Horror Story”) plays a country star fighting to stay on top in a business ready to push her aside for an up-and-coming crossover artist (Hayden Panettiere) who’s pretty much her worst nightmare.

What I like about it: For all the hissing that goes on in the first episode of “Nashville,” there’s more here than a catfight. This sweeping, filmed-in-Nashville ensemble drama from screenwriter Callie Khouri (“Thelma and Louise”) and documentarian R.J. Cutler (“The War Room”) embraces music, politics and a rapidly changing economy. There’s also family drama and humor. And, yeah, there’s sex.

It’s a top-of-the-line soap, set to some pretty good music. And I’m counting on Khouri not to take this one off a cliff.

You might be a “Nashville” fan if: You never miss “The Good Wife.” You think the discoveries of Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood alone were enough to justify the entire, increasingly excruciating run of “American Idol.” You loved Britton in “Friday Night Lights,” and you’re never happier than when you’re listening to her say “Y’all.”

Airing:
10 p.m. Wednesdays, ABC.

Premieres
: Oct. 10.

CBS’ “Elementary”

Jonny Lee Miller (“Eli Stone”) and Lucy Liu (“Ally McBeal”) star as Sherlock Holmes and, yes, Dr. Watson, in an update of the classic detective series — and the first one in which we meet Holmes shirtless.

What I like about it: “Elementary” manages not to encroach too much on “Sherlock,” that justly celebrated PBS “Masterpiece Mystery!” series that stars Benedict Cumberbatch (with whom Miller nightly swapped roles in a recent London theater production of “Frankenstein”), while at the same time gently pressing against the usual constraints of a CBS procedural.

Miller, who gets to use his own accent for a change, as well as his own tattoos, is fun to watch as the brilliant (and in this case, hyperkinetic) British detective who, after fleeing rehab, moves to New York, where he has been saddled with a “sober companion” (Liu). And given how much television owes to Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective, it’s good to see Holmes getting to use his own name for a change.

You might be an “Elementary” fan if: You can’t get enough of murder mysteries. You’ve always wanted a closer look at Miller’s body art. You loved “Sherlock” but are willing to cheat on Cumberbatch with a different Holmes.